The House of Widows

“Brisk, lyrical writing and a winning narrator make The House of Widows irresistible. A son’s quest to understand his father’s suicide, and so to excavate a family history extinguished by the exigencies of the new world, make it exceptional.”—Jhumpa Lahiri

His father’s British military uniform, an oversize glass jar, and a letter written in a language he can’t read: these are the only things James kept of his inheritance after his father’s untimely death. They become the keys to unlocking the door on a past James never imagined while growing up amid the security of Boston’s north shore, and they send him on an odyssey across England, Austria, and Ukraine. Along the way, he meets his dying aunt Vera, the matriarch of a mysterious branch of the family. His mission puts him face-to-face with the international sex trade, a displaced Palestinian girl with streaked pink hair and attitude to spare, and a violent world in which he is ultimately implicated. From old America, new Europe, and the timeless Middle East, James learns what it means to live in the webbed world of the twenty-first century. In The House of Widows, Askold Melnyczuk offers a searing exploration of the individual’s role in the inexorable assault of history.

“Askold Melnyczuk’s The House of Widows is a bewitching maze of storytelling that takes its postwar American hero on journeys to and through Europe to discover the secrets of earlier generations of his family. In so doing he comese across the would-be secret places of recent and contemporary European history — the betrayals, the uprootings, the iniquities, the cover-ups that seem to be demanded if individuals or organizations are to survive. But there is also, at moments, the ‘light of a flickering candle’ by which we can read and be heartened by the images that play on the wall of our cave. A mind-expanding book.”
—Nicholas Mosley

“The House of Widows is Askold Melnyczuk’s masterwork. It is a compelling story of fathers and sons and family ties in general, brimming with adventure, international intrigue, mystery, true historical events, and memorable characters from all walks of life. A novel of great scope and great wisdom, The House of Widows shows how, even in the presence of the worst atrocities imaginable, human beings are still capable of hope and love. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hemingway, The House of Widows represents serious contemporary fiction at its best. I hope it reaches tens of thousands of readers, in America and far beyond.”—Howard Frank Mosher